Cash-strapped AMD drills for green gold in Lone Star State

Processor bakery AMD will sell off and lease back its offices in Austin, Texas, to raise $164m in much-needed cash.

The chipmaker will sign a 12-year lease on the "Lone Star Campus", with an optional extension clause if the firm decides to stay on at the location.

It's not the first time that AMD has shifted some real estate to get its hands on some readies: the company has leased its headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, since 1998 when it did a similar deal on the property, and just five years ago it sold and leased back its major site in Ontario, Canada.

AMD said it had also put its "largely unoccupied" Building 3 property in Austin up for sale. Any workers still in the location will be "consolidated at other sites".

“As we reset and restructure AMD for long-term success, we are taking a number of steps designed to optimise our business and monetise assets,” Devinder Kumar, chief financial officer of AMD, said in a canned statement. “The sale of our Austin campus will unlock a significant amount of capital."

Kumar and chief exec Rory Read said earlier this year that they hoped to return AMD to profitability in the second half of this year, with new APU and graphics products helping as well as restructuring and cost-cutting. ®